EUROPA CLIPPER TO SEEK JUPITER SYSTEM'S OTHERLANDS: 4 /8: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds, by Thomas Halliday.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Otherlands-Journey-Through-Earths-Extinct/dp/B097CL2BVX/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr1
The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life on the page.
This book is an exploration of the Earth as it used to exist, the changes that have occurred during its history, and the ways that life has found to adapt―or not. It takes us from the savannahs of Pliocene Kenya to watch a python chase a group of australopithecines into an acacia tree; to a cliff overlooking the salt pans of the empty basin of what will be the Mediterranean Sea just as water from the Miocene Atlantic Ocean spills in; into the tropical forests of Eocene Antarctica; and under the shallow pools of Ediacaran Australia, where we glimpse the first microbial life.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSi in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Thomas Halliday, a paleontologist and author, |
| 0:08.0 | writing magically and convincingly of other lands, journey through Earth's extinct worlds. |
| 0:15.2 | This is before the asteroid, before the death of the dinosaurs. |
| 0:19.2 | It's called the Cretaceous Period, 125 million years ago. And I learned from Thomas to call |
| 0:25.0 | dinosaurs knuckle walkers. suppose what you're talking about is is sort and some of the |
| 0:34.4 | titanesaurian sort of yeah the titanesaurus that was a knuckle walker and yeah they |
| 0:40.2 | picture it for them well I mean the reason I call the knuckle |
| 0:44.1 | workers is because they and through their evolution when they're attaining such |
| 0:47.9 | large sizes and in order to have this kind of pillar-like limb one of the things that Titanosaurs in particular do is they lose the bones that are the same as our fingers. They lose their digit bones and so their their front feet are essentially just highly sort of modified hand bones. |
| 1:05.6 | They're working on the ends of their knuckles. |
| 1:07.0 | So that's what I meant by that way. |
| 1:08.9 | Oh, we, you write that this is the heyday of non-avian dinosaurs. |
| 1:14.3 | The titanesaurus is 17 meters long. |
| 1:18.7 | They're very large. |
| 1:20.0 | And these are herbivores. |
| 1:22.4 | They're eating the generosity of the earth. What does the forest look like at this time? My note says Cyprus trees. Yeah, this is a time, so this is back in the early Cretaceous, this particular site, a wonderful |
| 1:37.3 | environment in Liaoning in China. |
| 1:40.7 | And at this time, flowering plants hadn't got going. So we're not seeing, or rather they had begun to exist. The very earliest flowering plants are from this site, places like archibutures and so on. But mostly these forests are made up of conifers and of ginkos and cycabs and so and so it's probably a less colourful |
| 2:06.4 | forest than the one that we're familiar with today and but yes still a sort of you know it's still a sort of, you know, it's a diverse place. |
| 2:15.9 | We have dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes from those enormous 17 meter long Titanosaurs to small flying ones and birds like |
| 2:27.0 | Confucius Orness for example and you know and so ornithine birds and which is in my book I it displaying it's these low ribbon stream-alike |
| 2:37.2 | feathers over the lake like Seattle. I learned from you that the feathers are significant and that they might be part of |
... |
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